Today, Who Am I?
by restlessxpen
Summary: Years before Bella was born, her future was already being read. Another person lived vicariously through visions of a life that wasn't hers, but what else could Mary Alice Brandon do to stay sane?


**Author Notes:** Let me start off saying that I'm going to break several of the rules about Alice's seer abilities. For one, she's going to be able to see Jacob. She's also going to see visions of the future that no one has actually decided on yet. So, please pretend with me like this is perfectly okay. This is written to be a multi-chap fic, though it may not end up being too long. It's an idea I had about a year ago-when I actually wrote this first chapter. I will update as regularly as possible so as not to keep you waiting, but bear with me.

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><p>I dreamed that I was Bella Swan.<p>

Bella was a pale skinned girl with dark brown hair and similarly colored eyes. She was shy, but stubborn and prone to random bouts of clumsiness. She lived in Phoenix, Arizona with her mother most of her life, but Bella's heart belonged to Forks.

I was Bella as she traveled back to Forks, as she moved in with her father, Charlie Swan. I was Bella on her first day of school. I was Bella the first day that she saw Edward Cullen and fell in love.

I was in pain with Bella as she loved and lost, as she fought against monsters that moved in the shadows, and as she watched Edward walk away from her. I found my courage as Bella found hers, lost it and sunk into depression as Bella did, and lifted my head at the same moment as Bella when she brought Jacob Black into her life.

I relived Bella's memories of mud pies and tag with Jacob Black. I felt the changes in his matured body as she felt them. When Bella found out Jacob's secret, I did too. I stepped into Bella's life, if only for a moment.

"Jacob."

I reached for him. Bella's hands were bigger than mine, but still small compared to Jacob's. I could feel the heat of his skin. It was so hot, so feverish. He flinched as I touched him, as if this contact hurt him in ways that I would never be able to understand.

"Go home, Bella."

It was raining. Steam rose from his shoulders with each pelt of rain, transforming him into some angry rendition of a Greek god. I wanted to press my lips to his chest and feel the aching contrast of his flesh and the cold rain. I wanted him in ways that he would never know, but everything that I felt was kept under lock and key, never to see the true light of day, because Edward Cullen existed, and I could never change the fate that brought me back to Forks.

I loved two men, but I could only have _one_.

"Jacob, you have to understand..."

His black hair was slick against his forehead. He was angry. I could see the raw emotion in his eyes. His shoulders were heaving a little, like he was panting, trying to hold something back. I watched him lick rain water off of his lips.

The rain had found the crevices of his abs. It pearled and ran the lines in his stomach. I wanted to trace my finger behind them, but the last thing Jacob wanted me to do was to touch him.

"There's nothing left to say, Bella," he told me. "You've made your choice, and I've made mine. _I won't let him touch you_."

There was a sob working its way up my throat. It hurt like a ball of needles rising up. I couldn't swallow it for fear of death. I saw two paths before me. One led to Edward, the other to Jacob. I knew whichever path I didn't take would be consumed by flames, and I would hurt the man at the end of it mercilessly for my selfishness.

I reached for Jacob. I felt Edward in my heart, but Edward was gone. He was a million miles away. Jacob was always the only one that would stay.

()()()

Being Bella Swan was painful. She hurt in so many places that I couldn't touch or heal them all. I couldn't rationalize away her fears in any way that I knew that she would listen. I wanted to tell Bella that it would all be all right, that everything would work out. I had seen it, and I knew that it would be so, but Bella did not exist. She would not exist for many years to come. How would I meet her? How could I tell her? Some part of me believed that it was my fate to help her, but I would be dead long before the things I saw came to pass.

It was bittersweet to live again through my dreams of being Bella Swan.

But I existed in an empty room with bars. I existed on the cot that was chained to the wall, on the trays of food that came without a knife, fork, or spoon. I existed in a long gown and socks. I didn't look a thing like Bella Swan. I was small and short and slender. I had long, dark hair too, but it hung far down my back and was often in wild disarray. I had a small nose, and a small mouth, and small hands.

My name was not really Bella Swan.

My name was Mary Alice Brandon.

At least, that was what the doctors told me. It was the name I heard them speaking with hopelessness, with a quiet tinge of sadness. They did not think that I would recover, that I would ever be sane again. They pumped me full of drugs that made me sleepy and disoriented. They told me that they ran tests on me, but I didn't remember any of them.

They told me that my dreams were hallucinations, that no one could really see the future. I had stopped arguing with them a long time ago. I did not tell them about my dreams of Bella Swan, because I knew that they would believe that no such person would ever come to exist. They would think the same of the Cullen's and of Jacob Black. They would tell me that Bella Swan was an extension of my personality, that I only _thought_ that some part of me was a girl named Bella Swan who loved too many people.

They thought that I'd been born to rot in this prison where people screamed all day and night, and everyone was always crying.

It smelled like urine here, and it was hard to sleep.

The little slot on my door winked open. It was a tiny square that I had to stand on my tiptoes to see out of, but, sitting on my cot, I could see the familiar pair of eyes that looked in on me. They were pretty, though I couldn't tell the exact color. Sometimes they looked dark, and sometimes they seemed almost golden. I could see the strands of honey-blonde hair that curled around his face. He was a new doctor. He had began appearing two weeks ago, and he had a nice, calming voice. It had a twang to it, and I knew he wasn't from here, because _I _was from here, and _I _didn't have that pleasant catch in my voice.

"You have a favorite, it seems."

Another set of eyes appeared at the door. They wore glasses and were green. I knew this, because those eyes had looked down on me on many occasions. Those eyes were often the last ones that I saw as a needle pricked my arm and the straps around my chest went slack as I slumped against my bed. His name was Jason Strack. I had read his name tag.

"She doesn't seem crazy to me."

Dr. Strack sighed. "Some of them conceal it well."

The new doctor was staring at me like no one else had ever looked at me. He looked a little like Jacob Black, standing in the rain.

Jason Strack was done with me. There were no tests to run today. He told his companion that he was going home, that he needed sleep to stop hearing the crying and the screaming. When he was gone, it was just the honey haired man and me.

"I'm going to get you out of here, Mary Alice," he whispered to me.

It was a funny promise to make to a person that was locked in a cage.

The slot on the door slammed closed. It echoed straight into my heart as I sat on my cot, my knees drawn to my chest. It was the first thing that he had ever really said to me, except how he sometimes murmured that I wasn't crazy, that I _couldn't possibly_ be crazy. That had not been surprising. I had met several doctors that had not thought that I was crazy until I began to recite the future to them. Everything always went poorly from there.

I didn't think that I was crazy. Seeing the future didn't seem so strange to me in comparison to the other illnesses here. I did not see a legion of spiders crawling across the floor. I did not feel the need to dig holes into my own flesh with my fingernails. I had never once claimed to be some famous dead person reincarnated, and I did not believe that aliens had grown inside my brain, nor did I try to expel them by beating my head repeatedly on the walls.

My only flaw was that I saw people that had not yet been born and people that I would one day meet. I had known for a year now that I would meet the doctor with the honey-blonde hair, but I did not know why. I didn't question my dreams, and I also didn't believe that they were always true.

Bella Swan was my exception. I believed the things that I saw about her. That night, I was her again when the crying faded, and I fell asleep.

It was very cold outside. The wind was like teeth gnawing at my skin. It howled with the same ferocity, whipping snow in blinding sheets. I would have frozen to death in no time flat. I would have barely started to shiver before my heart would have stopped, and I would have crumpled into a dark lump on the wintery floor.

I would have ceased to have existed, like so many times before, if it hadn't have been for Jacob. He was carrying me through the snow and the trees. He was cradling me against his chest as he climbed the hills and wound his way through the terrain that would have been impossible for me to navigate. He asked for nothing in return as he shared his warmth that I felt travel from the tips of my fingers through every nerve in my body.

A war was going on. Two impossibly strong foes were going to fight soon, and I felt like the center, the source of all of these problems that made such a battle impossible to avoid. I couldn't explain to Jacob how guilty I felt, how I wished, for a few, self-loathing seconds, that I had never moved back to Forks. It was my fault for loving Edward, and it was my fault that Jacob had become involved.

I had done this awful thing to both of them.

I glanced up at Jacob.

"I-I'm so sorry, Jake."

He actually smiled. My heart broke with it.

"_When_ are you finally going to realize that you're in love with me too?"

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><p><strong>Author Notes: <strong>Please leave reviews and let me know what you think of the overall idea. I'm also going to be taking the liberty of adding in things that weren't in the book/movie, so be prepared for some twists.


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